Kota Bharu: A Muslim Movie Set

In my travels across the Malaysian peninsula, there was a small city near the northeastern border with Thailand that really captured my interest. Kota Bharu, the capital of Kuantan province, is generally passed over by travelers or used as a stop-over en route from southern Thailand to the island paradises of Pulau Perenthian, which is a shame; it has probably the friendliest populous in Southeast Asia and the best selection of cheap ethnic eats.

Kota Bharu is the only city in the Malaysian peninsula that is predominately Muslim. Walking through its streets, you can really feel like you’re on a movie set. During any of the 5 daily prayer times, speakers from the mosques blast out guttural chants that serve as a surreal background soundtrack for exploration. Women rushing back and forth from the markets are all dressed in these beautiful batik fabrics, vibrant and colorful, with matching shawls that hide most of their heads but really bring out the more subtle features of their faces. The smells of spicy fish curries waft from every street corner along with freshly cooked noodles and herbal teas.

Anyways, it’s a great little town that was a refreshing departure from Thailand and I wanted to share some shots of the town markets.

Click HERE for the photos.

Taman Negara to Taman Merlion: Jungle to Metropolis

Taman is the Malay word for ‘park.’ Negara is ‘national.’ Taman Negara, the National Park of Malaysia, is the world’s oldest rainforest. So how old is ‘old’? An impressive 130 million years old. Think about that. That’s 65,000 times more distant from our lives than Christ. Taman Negara owes much of its longevity to its relatively close position to the equator. It survived several Ice Ages and geothermal disasters. It’s the stuff of legend. I spent a couple days hiking its more easily accessible routes (like the one leading to the pictured Canopy Walk), taking a wooden speedboat down its river’s rapids, and getting red mud tattoos from locals.

So that’s Taman Negara. Keeping in mind that taman means ‘park,’ what do you think that Taman Merlion means? Surely merlion doesn’t refer to the unholy union of the Queen of the Sea and the King of the Jungle. Right? Right!? Wrong. The Merlion – indeed half Mermaid, half Lion – is the ‘mascot’ of Singapore. Who knew that cities had – or needed – mascots? I was wondering what Knoxville’s would be, but then I realized that for all intents and purposes we do have a mascot (the Volunteer and/or Smokey, of course). Maybe since Singapore isn’t big enough for any kind of sports league, they thought they’d just make one hybrid, Voltron-esque mascot for the whole country.

On my first night in Singapore, I was taking a bit of a stroll down the city’s stunning waterfront promenade – which earns my nomination for ‘coolest place to spend an evening’ in Southeast Asia – when I happed upon a sign pointing to “Taman Merlion.” I had read about the mascot before in my guidebook, but never gave it a second thought until now. I veered off the road down to the bay and came upon the funniest looking thing I have seen in weeks: a life-sized statue (I say ‘life-sized’ because I can only imagine that a merlion would be several meters tall in real life) of the beast illuminated by floodlights, sitting proudly on its curled, feminine mermaid fin and spewing a stream of water from its mouth. The merlion elicited an explosive fit of laughter from deep within me – the kind that only solo travelers and asylum inmates seem to make. I swear that when it saw me, the lion-shaped torso looked almost embarrassed at its forced association.

Bandannas and Times Square

My head has been naked for the past 3 months. When I was gathering my laundry from the maze of clotheslines on the roof of Dali No. 5 Inn, I noticed that my bandanna was curiously absent. This do-rag was my favorite piece of headwear in the world (I’ve conveniently circled it in the picture above just in case you have trouble distinguishing it from Soup’s Vietcong assault ware). I scoured the entire place, peeking under the unmentionables – sorry to mention them – of dozens of globetrotters, but alas, it was no where to be found. At the time, I couldn’t imagine that it was stolen. That just seemed impossible. I know it was camouflage and badass, but who would take a cheap piece of fabric? Now that I have been halfway across the continent, I am beginning to understand the motives of our fabric thief: you literally cannot find a bandanna to save your life in Southeast Asia.

Anything else you want – anything – is for the taking: screen-printed t-shirts of beer companies, cartography sets, fake diplomas and driver’s licenses, decorative umbrellas, flying squirrels, you name it. I’ve searched high and low from China to Laos to Cambodia and Thailand. Nothing.

When I arrived to Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, I found myself at a guesthouse on a massive pedestrian shopping street, just around the corner from ‘Times Square,’ the biggest shopping mall in all of Southeast Asia. If I couldn’t find a replacement here, I’d never find one.

The first thing to dawn on me upon entering a place like Times Square is that Americans – who once reigned supreme over all that is material – have been disposed from their throne as the world’s most avid consumers. That crown now belongs to the Asians. When you think about the psychology behind rabid consumerism, it all kind of makes sense; in the past 20 years, Asian countries have been experiencing massive economic booms. In the wake of success, we’re seeing an emerging middle class in China, Thailand, Malaysia, and – most notably – in Singapore and Hong Kong. People who could barely afford to eat growing up are now finding themselves with pocketfuls of extra cash. So they flaunt it. Now that they can spend, they probably feel that they have to.

But there are more pressing issues than fiscal anthropology; my head was still nude. You’d think that amongst 10 floors of shopping, a square foot of fabric would be an incredibly easy thing to come across. I found a lot of things in Times Square. I found the Hajj Game and the Amazing Mosque Race. I found a store called Cue that sold only billiards paraphernalia. I found a travel agency that only dealt with flights to countries ending in –stan. I found two branches of Sock World. I found an entire half floor of furniture that looked like a space-aged ghost town. I found that there was a 20 story hotel attached to each end of the shopping mall. I found that the staff of each shop knew as much as the information desk, which was nothing. I found myself being led to the 6^th floor, then down to the 2^nd, then back up to the 8^th, and then all the way to the 1^st.

Each time I asked a clerk where I could find a bandanna, they would look at me like I asked who the Comptroller of Swaziland was. Finally, after inquiring from no less than 30 people about where in the fair city of Kuala Lampur I might procure a do-rag, a magical thing happened: I found one. There was a small selection amongst a host of wigs (I guess the two are always used in conjunction in SE Asia) at a store called Mono. The irony of getting sick the day after visiting a store named after an infectious disease has not been lost on this traveler.

Thailand Pictures

Here are a bunch of pics from my 2 months in Thailand. I've started to post my pictures to Facebook instead of Kodak Gallery... let me know if you think it's better or worse, easier or more difficult, or whatever.

The first few (Songkran, Chiang Mai, Sukothai):

HERE

The second several (Rocket Festival, Central Thai, Bangkok, the Islands, Full Moon Party):

HERE

What "Train Track Failure" Really Means

Wow, I don't even know where to begin to explain this one. Let's just say that I've had my first run-in with Islamic extremists on this trip. I say 'this trip' because there was once before, in Amsterdam, when I met a duo of Moroccans who told me repeatedly about their desire to spray an ocean full of bullets over Israel and since then I've tried to avoid all Jihad-related discussions. But this was different - way different.

I'll start from the end. I found this article online after being informed about the happenings of the last few days in the ever volatile Thai south by fellow travelers whilst soaking up the rays on the Perhentian Islands:

CLICK HERE

Zoom back to June the 4th. I was en route to Malaysia from Thailand, enjoying the luxury of my 2nd class sleeper when I was so rudely awakened by a jolt as our train stopped. A hurried attendant came into the back car, where I was grumpily stirring, and asked us to promptly awake and gather our things; the train was experiencing a "track failure" and was going to have to back up two stations to Hat Yai. We were to disembark immediately upon arrival there. Upon stepping onto the platform, I was greeted by a TV cameraman who was up in my face like peanut butter on jelly. 'I guess he's never seen a tourist,' I thought. I made my way across town to the bus station after receiving a pittance of a refund from the ever generous Thai Railway system, where I nearly witnessed the largest riot in history over the privilege to board a mini-van. You see, everyone who had been headed to the Malaysian border via train was now trying to procure tickets on the only mini-bus headed anywhere near Sungai Kolok. After nearly getting stampeded to death, the ticket attendant, threw up his arms and left for a half hour. He returned with a big, clunky bus that must have seen its last use right around when - judging by its cobweb-covered colored lights - disco died. At least we had a bus. In Cambodia, they would certainly have made all 100+ people board a single Dodge Caravan and probably stick a few more on the roof for good measure.

About an hour into our trip - including the twice around the bus station we did just for good measure - traffic began to slow to almost a complete halt. We crept along the road until finally we could see the cause of the hold-up; a crowd of hundreds of Muslims clad in robes and shawls had blocked off all but one lane of traffic in front of a mosque. They were standing arms folded - like a troop of Arabic bouncers - and cast glances of death at each person who passed. The Thai people on the bus started to shrink in their seats. A woman a few rows ahead of me stood up to look and see what was happening and her boyfriend pulled her back to the seat. All was tense as we passed the scene, then the Sungai Kolok native sitting beside me explained what the trouble was the best he could... by making a serious of explosion noises. Indeed he was correct. 5 days ago - auspiciously the Buddha's birthday - machine gunfire ripped through the mosque and a roadside bomb killed 10-15 police officers and civilians. Now, the Muslim community was staging a giant protest. It was the closest feeling I'll probably ever experience to driving through the West Bank of Israel.

I think it's pretty cool that I've probably had my face on Thai TV along with a segment with phrases like 'Muslim Insurgents' and 'derailed train.' So we've had the 'stranded by a jackknifed 18 wheeler' event in China (not to mention the dirt road being dug right in from of our van), the 'hey, let's stuff 26 people in a pickup truck with all their luggage' bright idea in Cambodia, a few other mishaps made trivial only be the aforementioned disasters, and now the 'Shanghai-ed by Muslim extremists' adventure. I should think that I have a decent store of travel karma built up come Europe. Don't you?

The Full Moon Party: Need I Say More

I have to admit that my desire to attend Thailand’s infamous Full Moon Party was fuelled largely – if not solely – by the street cred it carries amongst backpackers. Though relatively unknown/unheralded by my fellow Americans back Stateside, anyone that owns a travel-sized rucksack has heard the tales of debauchery that wash up from Ko Phangan’s shores at the ends of each 28 day lunar cycle. The rampant drugs, the sex, the blaring electronic music of more sub-genres than you’ve ever heard of, it’s the stuff of legend.

I can’t remember exactly when my ears had their my first encounter with these stories of the Holy Grail of parties. I can say with certainty that it was sometime during my first sojourn of length in Europe, long before I had even dreamed of coming to Southeast Asia. I was only just beginning to discover the piazzas of Italy and the cafés of France, and the idea of this magical Never-Never Land called ‘Thailand,’ with its beachside bungalows and hammock-citizen ration of 1:1, was about as tangible as a trip to the rings of Saturn. And then, there was this slightly ghoulish sounding ‘full moon party.’ Dancing the night away under the stars on a remote beach, miles away from the nearest care in world had (and still has) such an exotic appeal that it was instantly romanticized in my childlike fantasy to a degree that would forever remain untouchable in reality.

I won’t bother explaining the event itself in any detail. You know what a party is like. Take the biggest frat party you’ve ever been to, remove the frat boys and sorrostitues, replace them with backpackers and actual prostitutes, substitute a beach for the house and electronica for the Dave Mathews CD, eliminate the noise ordinances, trade the beers for buckets of Thai whiskey, throw in some thieves, add a lot of black light body paint, and multiply by a factor of 20.

It was alright. Nothing Earth-moving.

The Full Moon Party’s place amongst the great celebrations on my world-circumvention festival tour is hazy at best. On one hand, it’s a massive, world renowned, gathering of merriment in the middle of a tropical paradise. On the other, it lacks all the history, tradition, and cultural significance that all the other celebrations on my itinerary have. Call the Full Moon Party a Thai ‘festival,’ and Songkran and the Rocket Festival would simultaneously slap you across the face. It’s simply a blockbuster party, no more no less.